Boehner urges GOP solidarity in 'epic battle'

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, right, is joined at a news conference Friday by, from left, Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, STF

WASHINGTON - With his troops anxious for a way forward, Speaker John Boehner opened a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Friday morning with a recitation of letters from local schoolchildren on how they deal with stress.

A shower helps, one child counseled. So does a nap.

But on the matter causing all that congressional stress, the speaker offered no clue as to how he expected Congress to get out of the dead end it has found itself in, with the government shut for a fourth day and no clear path to raise the federal debt limit to avoid a first-ever default.

"We are locked in an epic battle," the speaker told his rank and file, those who attended the meeting said, urging them to "hang tough." The overarching problem for the man at the center of the budget fight, say allies and foes, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the crisis.

No fear of coup

They are only trying to survive another day, Republican strategists say, hoping to maintain unity as long as possible so that when the Republican position collapses, they can capitulate on two issues at once - financing the government and raising the debt ceiling - and quickly head off any internal party backlash. Republican lawmakers say that Boehner has assured them privately that he will not permit a federal default.

Backers of the speaker say he does not have to fear a coup. His obvious successor, the majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, is now so caught up in the current legislative battle that he would probably be washed away with Boehner in a tea party putsch.

"I do not believe he's primarily concerned with saving his speakership. He's concerned with saving the House Republican Conference," said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member.

If the speaker were to move on a stopgap spending bill now, without conservative policy priorities attached, it would likely pass with Republican and Democratic votes. But the ensuing Republican uproar - on and off Capitol Hill - would ensure that there would be no Republican votes to raise the debt ceiling. "It's common-sense strategy," one Republican strategist said. "If you're going to take a bullet, you want to take just one."

Speaker fading away?

It has been a long time since a House speaker has faced the many challenges confronting Boehner. On paper, he is the perfect man for the moment, a veteran congressional institutionalist with a history of working with Democrats on big problems and someone bruised by the memory of the last government shutdown and the harm it did to his party.

That John Boehner has faded, carried away by the tea party current that swept him to power and is now pulling him from the moorings of his past. His troops are badly fractured, with conservatives advocating one strategy and a growing band of pragmatists demanding the opposite.

Aides to Boehner, however, say the speaker has a clear vision of where he wants to end up in the current crisis but is unwilling to lay out his goals until he has a Democratic partner with whom to negotiate. Democrats are openly disrespecting his leadership and disregarding his demands. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, suggested again Friday that Boehner was putting his speakership over his country.

Even GOP allies say whatever strategy exists seems to be dictated not by the speaker, but by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the hard-line Republican who helped launch the "defund Obamacare" movement.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and a Boehner loyalist, said: "You really have to call Cruz, I'm not even joking about that. That's really what you have to do, because he's the one that set up the strategy, he's the one that got us into this mess."

Democrats say they simply cannot trust the speaker to deliver. Reid said Friday that Boehner came to him at the end of July with a proposition: If Senate Democratic leaders could accept a stopgap spending measure in the fall at levels that reflected across-the-board spending cuts, the speaker would refrain from adding extraneous measures that could cause a clash. Reid was leery, since that level - $988 billion in discretionary spending for fiscal year 2014 - would be $70 billion less than the Senate-passed budget.

"I didn't like it. I've got a couple of tough women to deal with," he said, referring to Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Doesn't carry through

On Sept. 12, in a meeting of the top four congressional leaders, Boehner said he had problems with a conservative groundswell demanding that gutting the health care law accompany any spending measure.

Reid and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, both suggested a maneuver that would allow the House to vote on a stopgap spending bill with a side provision removing funds from the health care law that the Senate could strip out before sending the measure to the president. Again, the speaker agreed. And again, he could not carry through, Reid said.

As for Boehner, on Friday he played down any animosity between him and his Democratic adversaries but showed a flash of temper when he referred to suggestions from the White House that Democrats had the advantage. "This isn't some damn game," he said, his voice rising. "The American people don't want their government shut down and neither do I."